Peacekeeping in the Political Marketplace
Conventional peacekeeping operations are designed as stop-gap measures, either for a brief period of time or with a limited brief in a frozen conflict. This can be functional if the peacekeepers are dealing with institutionalized belligerents, with functioning hierarchies. It worked in the Ethio-Eritrean conflict, as for example in Cyprus. But in so-called ‘fragile states’, there is a risk that peacekeeping missions will turn into open-ended commitments.
Fragile states are typically defined by what they are not–they are not Weberian states in which autonomous state institutions administer the rule of law and regulate political conflicts, and not states in which governments deliver services on an efficient and impartial basis. International policies for dealing with such states, from Afghanistan to Congo, assume that these states can build ‘normal’ institutions in a brief historical span. Kofi Annan’s 2001 report, ‘No Exit Without Strategy,’ defined the criteria for success for peacekeeping operations in an identical way: ‘domestic peace becomes sustainable, when the natural conflicts of society can be resolved through the exercise of State sovereignty and, generally, participatory governance.’ This is, I fear, a formula for peacekeeping missions without end.
In this month’s International Affairs I have an article, “Mission without End” which outlines my analysis of why this is so. I argue that our starting point should be, how these states actually function–often as a patrimonial political marketplace, in which loyalties are up for auction at every level, and violence is a routine tool for political bargaining. Because international peace support missions enter these countries with a legal-technocratic frame of mind, they assume that problems are amenable to institutionalized fixes and that every agreement is legally binding. This isn’t the case, and a mission that tries to operate in this way becomes both frustrated and deeply enmeshed in the host country’s socio-political fabric. And because a mission will act, by design or default, as a patron itself, it influences the price of loyalty, inflating or deflating the cost according to which groups it supports or opposes. Which in turn means that a peacekeeping mission cannot withdraw without expecting a ‘market correction’, usually violent. I do not have any ready to hand fixes for this problem, but begin to sketch the outlines of how we might better understand it.
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I agree with Alex’s assessment. I know quite a few other people who probably do as well. Whenever I have discussed this matter with policy-makers, they may privately concede the logic of this argument, but are nervous about pursuing anything much beyond the ‘technocratic fix’ approach to so-called ‘failed’ states. This is because they don’t like to contemplate the type of conclusions they may otherwise come to.
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The question is: what else could be done? Some commentators respond that African countries should simply be left to their own devices. This is an approach (a non-approach, really) that appeals both to some pan-Africanists, who are impatient with anything that smacks of neo-colonialism, as well as to Western conservatives who see Africa as just a waste of money. But leaving ‘failed’ African states to their own devices is not a realistic option. States exist in order to guarantee, among other things, certain international requirements. We see this in Somalia, where the lack of a functioning state has resulted in piracy. This is a problem not only to Western states, but to everyone. Hence Asian countries as well as NATO ones are sending warships to Somali waters. Giving assistance to countries that are in trouble is not just a humanitarian matter.
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All the sorts of arrangements that could promise a better way forward have implications for the sovereignty of African states. That is precisely why politicians and diplomats do not want to contemplate them. African power-holders do not want to give up their sovereign rights, and Western policy-makers do not want long-term commitments that they fear may suck them in to taking more responsibility than is currently the case.
The greater part of academic literature on peace operations starts from the premise that they are neutral and impartial interventions deployed by a unitary international community. This assumption tends to lead to a technocratic albeit important debate about the adequate functioning or non-functioning of any given peace operation, usually in Sub-Sahara Africa. While I understand the value of Alex de Waal’s contribution to transforming the orientation of this debate, it is also important to look at the silences of this academic paradigm in general, namely the political origins and development of UN peacekeeping in Africa. Here, it is useful to remember that peace operations have changed quite dramatically from small inter-state peacekeeping operations designed to maintain the status-quo between nation-states to larger operations within states that have extensive mandates that range from holding-the-ring between armed actors to implementing market-democracy. A useful point to remember here is that it is not simply the fact that international crises have changed and therefore require new activities on the part of international organisations; it is also the case that the political dynamics and agendas of the forums like the Security Council have been transformed radically since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Previously off-limit areas to this great-power body– mainly questions of domestic governance and jurisdiction – have now become a regular and routine part of the Council’s activities, largely through the means of the ubiquitous peacekeeping operation. Indeed, the extraordinary expansion of peace operations after 1991 reflects, at least in part, a concerted attempt to refocus the activities of the UN towards certain nation-building roles in the periphery.
There is also the question of the political agendas of the permanent Security Council members when it comes to authorising peacekeeping operations: for example in 1992 in Angola with UNAVEM II the Bush Administration was quietly hoping and pushing for a UNITA victory and ‘Sandinista’ type defeat for the MPLA in national elections; and in Rwanda in 1993 the Arusha Protocols and subsequent establishment of the disastrous UNAMIR to oversee their implementation was seen as a ‘negotiated surrender’ for the incumbent regime and political order. The simple overall point is that some focus needs to be put on both the wider ideological and political agenda and import of peacekeeping in Africa.      Â